Where Have I Been?
May. 20th, 2014 01:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xyzzysqrlOkay, I haven't posted anything here in like a couple weeks now and that's just wrong. Remember when I had it down to once a day, every single day? That felt good, because I could just open up Notepad++ and start typing and KNOW that I was going to be marking the day with something. Anything! Some ramble or a post about video games or a playlog.
I have found that when I'm not posting anything here, everything I do gets affixed in my head with "I should make a post about that." I have finally hit that mental state where I can be a writer or I can be -not writing-, but I cannot be 'not a writer'. I tried for years to make myself have that perspective shift, and then it goes and happens when I'm not looking. I wish that surprised me.
(I am of course using "be a writer" in the loosest terms that can be imagined. I am constantly amazed y'all show up to read these things, and even more amazed anyone finds anything significant in them. As ever, without an audience I am merely yelling the events of my life down a pit. It always delights and shocks me when the pit yells back.)
So. What have I actually been doing?
Watching Sailor Moon, for one. It's been getting a release on Hulu -- No cuts, no edits, all the seasons, no faffery with "cousins" who seem close in a peculiar yet intriguing way. All right, we're too early for that anyway. They've put up four episodes with two more coming every Monday. For a bit I genuinely thought about liveblogging each episode, but do you really want to see me awkwardly liveblog a cartoon from 1992? People are still waiting for me to finish recapping Gundam Wing. (I am sorry I never finished recapping Gundam Wing.)
For two, Dynasty Warriors 8 Xtreme Legends (I'm sorry, that's how they spell it) has had a grip on me. Okay, let me just...
The Dynasty Warriors games have one plot: Recap Romance of the Three Kingdoms. ROTK is an ancient Chinese novel, one of their Four Great Works, about the three rival kingdoms of Wu, Shu, and Wei and the schemes and heroism and battles and deaths and lives of all these amazing people who could -- over a weekend, seemingly -- raise an army of millions and march across the land to prove the justice of their ideals in combat.
Dynasty Warriors further fictionalizes these events by adding in new characters (Did Yue Ying, wife of great strategist Zhuge Liang, really invent bomb-dropping mechanical hawks and gunpowder-filled wheeled mines? No, she may not have actually even existed. Is she awesome and a blast to play as? Hell yes she is.) and remixing the events of the storyline around a little each game.
By now these are sprawling, sprawling games... the one I'm playing has 82 characters, five factions plus an "Others" box full of one-off stages, three campaigns (Historical, Hypothetical, Hypothetical 2: Revenge of Lu Bu) for four of the factions and one campaign for the other, a "Free Play" mode which lets you stick anybody in any stage even if they are dead or not IN that army, an Ambition mode where you attempt to build a giant-ass tower to impress the Emperor...
It's a lot of game. I've played one faction's Historical and Hypothetical modes to the end and am working on Ambition mode while I try to decide if I want to skip off to another faction or blitz the final Hypothetical scenario.
The traditional criticism of Dynasty Warriors is that it can be played by hammering the attack buttons as fast as possible while pointing your character towards the largest group of soldiers on-screen, and... while I guess that's still technically true, the objectives system has been better laid out to give you more of a flow. In previous DW games I always ended up wandering around the backass end of China's Silent Hill province, draw-distance obscuring fog swirling around as I tried to figure out which base to capture before the plot would start rolling again.
They've tightened up the scripting on what you're supposed to do to create a more-obvious workflow through the battle, directing you through bases and around winding paths, so you can plow through waves of hapless soldiers and duel all the generals without each stage taking 45 minutes. Pacing really helps. It feels dynamic instead of sloggy, and I love that. I did get lost a couple of times, but each time I did it was because I was missing a map marker.
That said, there are secrets and optional objectives that require going off the beaten path sometimes. I'm not even gonna try to unlock the 5th and 6th level Weapons for each character without some kind of guidebook, as this requires arcane, Tower of Druaga-esqe guessing at which character you should use in what stage and what mystical summoning process you should pluck forth from your backside to get the weapon box to appear. Yeah no, GameFAQs AWAAAY.
Now, I bought the PC version and there's two worrying catches to my otherwise-enjoyable experience. First is that I've seen zero sign of the DLC showing up on Steam, and that makes me sad because I want to beat people over the head with a bench while replaying stages from the previous games remade in this excellent engine.
Second is that this PC port eats babies or something. I don't know what it does to people but the Steam forums are an endless hive of "DON'T BUY THIS PORT IT DOESN'T WORK FOR ANYONE" except I guess for me? Anyway sometimes levels won't load on the first try and I have to quit, restart the game, and try a second time. That's been my biggest problem.
Anyway at this point I can't actively say "Go buy the Steam version it's great" because according to swarms of complaining people it requires blood sacrifice to actually get working, but I don't care because it works fricking fantastic for me. I will do the Joy Shuffle sometime when y'all aren't watching.
This is in no way getting me any closer to finishing Metal Saga, of course. I kinda think my momentum on that is dead and it should be shelved, but as always I feel Intense Guilt abandoning a project mid-stream. (I am REALLY SORRY I never finished recapping Gundam Wing.) If you all won't hold it against me, I may move to something else in a couple days.
Maybe I'll take a request or two? I don't know.
All that said, Ancient China is not going to unify ITSELF. Back to that I go.
I have found that when I'm not posting anything here, everything I do gets affixed in my head with "I should make a post about that." I have finally hit that mental state where I can be a writer or I can be -not writing-, but I cannot be 'not a writer'. I tried for years to make myself have that perspective shift, and then it goes and happens when I'm not looking. I wish that surprised me.
(I am of course using "be a writer" in the loosest terms that can be imagined. I am constantly amazed y'all show up to read these things, and even more amazed anyone finds anything significant in them. As ever, without an audience I am merely yelling the events of my life down a pit. It always delights and shocks me when the pit yells back.)
So. What have I actually been doing?
Watching Sailor Moon, for one. It's been getting a release on Hulu -- No cuts, no edits, all the seasons, no faffery with "cousins" who seem close in a peculiar yet intriguing way. All right, we're too early for that anyway. They've put up four episodes with two more coming every Monday. For a bit I genuinely thought about liveblogging each episode, but do you really want to see me awkwardly liveblog a cartoon from 1992? People are still waiting for me to finish recapping Gundam Wing. (I am sorry I never finished recapping Gundam Wing.)
For two, Dynasty Warriors 8 Xtreme Legends (I'm sorry, that's how they spell it) has had a grip on me. Okay, let me just...
The Dynasty Warriors games have one plot: Recap Romance of the Three Kingdoms. ROTK is an ancient Chinese novel, one of their Four Great Works, about the three rival kingdoms of Wu, Shu, and Wei and the schemes and heroism and battles and deaths and lives of all these amazing people who could -- over a weekend, seemingly -- raise an army of millions and march across the land to prove the justice of their ideals in combat.
Dynasty Warriors further fictionalizes these events by adding in new characters (Did Yue Ying, wife of great strategist Zhuge Liang, really invent bomb-dropping mechanical hawks and gunpowder-filled wheeled mines? No, she may not have actually even existed. Is she awesome and a blast to play as? Hell yes she is.) and remixing the events of the storyline around a little each game.
By now these are sprawling, sprawling games... the one I'm playing has 82 characters, five factions plus an "Others" box full of one-off stages, three campaigns (Historical, Hypothetical, Hypothetical 2: Revenge of Lu Bu) for four of the factions and one campaign for the other, a "Free Play" mode which lets you stick anybody in any stage even if they are dead or not IN that army, an Ambition mode where you attempt to build a giant-ass tower to impress the Emperor...
It's a lot of game. I've played one faction's Historical and Hypothetical modes to the end and am working on Ambition mode while I try to decide if I want to skip off to another faction or blitz the final Hypothetical scenario.
The traditional criticism of Dynasty Warriors is that it can be played by hammering the attack buttons as fast as possible while pointing your character towards the largest group of soldiers on-screen, and... while I guess that's still technically true, the objectives system has been better laid out to give you more of a flow. In previous DW games I always ended up wandering around the backass end of China's Silent Hill province, draw-distance obscuring fog swirling around as I tried to figure out which base to capture before the plot would start rolling again.
They've tightened up the scripting on what you're supposed to do to create a more-obvious workflow through the battle, directing you through bases and around winding paths, so you can plow through waves of hapless soldiers and duel all the generals without each stage taking 45 minutes. Pacing really helps. It feels dynamic instead of sloggy, and I love that. I did get lost a couple of times, but each time I did it was because I was missing a map marker.
That said, there are secrets and optional objectives that require going off the beaten path sometimes. I'm not even gonna try to unlock the 5th and 6th level Weapons for each character without some kind of guidebook, as this requires arcane, Tower of Druaga-esqe guessing at which character you should use in what stage and what mystical summoning process you should pluck forth from your backside to get the weapon box to appear. Yeah no, GameFAQs AWAAAY.
Now, I bought the PC version and there's two worrying catches to my otherwise-enjoyable experience. First is that I've seen zero sign of the DLC showing up on Steam, and that makes me sad because I want to beat people over the head with a bench while replaying stages from the previous games remade in this excellent engine.
Second is that this PC port eats babies or something. I don't know what it does to people but the Steam forums are an endless hive of "DON'T BUY THIS PORT IT DOESN'T WORK FOR ANYONE" except I guess for me? Anyway sometimes levels won't load on the first try and I have to quit, restart the game, and try a second time. That's been my biggest problem.
Anyway at this point I can't actively say "Go buy the Steam version it's great" because according to swarms of complaining people it requires blood sacrifice to actually get working, but I don't care because it works fricking fantastic for me. I will do the Joy Shuffle sometime when y'all aren't watching.
This is in no way getting me any closer to finishing Metal Saga, of course. I kinda think my momentum on that is dead and it should be shelved, but as always I feel Intense Guilt abandoning a project mid-stream. (I am REALLY SORRY I never finished recapping Gundam Wing.) If you all won't hold it against me, I may move to something else in a couple days.
Maybe I'll take a request or two? I don't know.
All that said, Ancient China is not going to unify ITSELF. Back to that I go.
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Livejournal Spam Comment (you knew this was coming)
Date: 2014-05-25 09:43 pm (UTC)meat in the ice cream section.
NeopoliSPAM.
Small, pink, made of spooo,
Fat, mean, processed meat gunman.
Yosemite SPAM.
Gloomy autumn day
SPAM slips from plate, onto floor
Melancholy fall
In the innermost
circle of hell, Dante finds
Jay Hormel alone.
*run, hide*